Student Showcase – Elizabeth Efferson

Interviewed by Anthony Kosenkov.

Portrait by: Jazmine Marie

Elizabeth Efferson (she/her)

Second Year, Painting

How did you discover your passion for painting and what has it done for you?

I was really more into just drawing for most of my teen years, I kind of didn’t do art for most of my childhood. I was more into colored pencils and everything, watercolor. I went to a class at my local community center that was teaching oil painting and I’d never tried it before and I thought I would hate it because it takes so long to do and so long to dry, but it’s so much fun. I just love how you can always go back to it and if you want to fix something, you always can. You can paint over it, you can start again and I just think it’s something that lasts forever. It’s just really satisfying to make a finished piece. 

What did your process look like in creating this series of paintings, from conceptualization to putting the final strokes?

I have a different process for every piece that I do. I don’t have a step one, two and three. I really should, but I don’t. It depends on the project, sometimes I’ll have a solid idea and I just start painting. Sometimes I just go through iterations in my sketchbook before I start putting it on canvas. My first painting in this series, I did a painting with a face and I didn’t like it, so just blocking it out was my solution. I thought that was really interesting and thought it would be fun to do a series of them.  

How do some of your works come from a place of fear and what do they aim to convey?

In this series, many of my works were kind of going off of the theme of identity and lack of identity so that the viewer could kind of project their own meaning onto them, like who that person is. I guess fear would be an interesting way to interpret that. A fear of yourself and your identity is one way to see it.

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